{"id":799,"date":"2005-06-27T21:05:35","date_gmt":"2005-06-28T01:05:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/2005\/06\/27\/curse-of-the-technologically-proficient\/"},"modified":"2010-01-16T08:24:13","modified_gmt":"2010-01-16T13:24:13","slug":"curse-of-the-technologically-proficient","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/2005\/06\/27\/curse-of-the-technologically-proficient\/","title":{"rendered":"Curse of the technologically proficient"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px;\" class=\"sharethis-inline-share-buttons\" ><\/div><p>I recognize that I&#8217;m a particularly heavy and aggressive computer user, and that as a consequence, I&#8217;m likely to experience more than my fair share of technology-related problems (hey, if you only turn on your computer once a month, it&#8217;s that much less likely that it&#8217;s going to crash, right?). But lately, it&#8217;s like I&#8217;m cursed.<\/p>\n<p>I didn&#8217;t write about this on Saturday, when I was in a much rantier mood, but the cable company managed to screw up my service appointment. The one that the technician made the week before. As I mentioned earlier, he had managed to fix my immediate problem by replacing my modem and reconfiguring the wiring, but there was a &quot;signal bleed&quot; problem in the trunk line to my apartment. So he called it in so that it could get replaced because he couldn&#8217;t take down the molding by himself, and let me know that a &quot;team&quot; would be showing up on Saturday to fix it.<\/p>\n<p>So Saturday rolls around, and guess what? One guy shows up. And as he&#8217;s walking to the door, he&#8217;s already telling me that the job got misclassified as a regular service call. And it wouldn&#8217;t be getting fixed today. Now note, I, personally, don&#8217;t have any service problems at this point. The sole reason that I sat around all day on Saturday was so that they could access the end of the trunk line that enters my apartment. I was essentially doing them a really big favor. So, of course, I feel I deserve some sort of compensation from the cable company for my time, inconvenience, aggravation, etc.<\/p>\n<p>I get on the phone with customer service guy, who proceeds to explain to me that they *never* give billing credit to customers unless the service person fails to show up. And since the service person showed up (albeit a completely useless person), I have no claim. Oh, and it&#8217;s somehow my fault that they misclassified the call because I was apparently not specific enough. Mind you, I never spoke to them. I just stood next to the <em>technician<\/em> as he made the appointment. And he was very specific (I mean, if it was handle-able by an individual technician, <em>he would have just done it himself<\/em>).<\/p>\n<p>So I get the supervisor. Who, after I posit my argument that <em>technically<\/em> I was entitled to a month free under their policy because they failed to send a technician <em>who was actually qualified to fix my problem<\/em>, that I wouldn&#8217;t be receiving the correct service within the four hour window, eventually agreed and I&#8217;m getting a $145 credit (and yes, that is what my monthly digital cable\/dvr\/road runner package costs).<\/p>\n<p>Oh, and when I finally get the call to reschedule, <em>again, <\/em>they claim they don&#8217;t need access to my apartment. which is funny, because the line actually runs through a hole in the wall from the hallway above my front door, and then gets connected to my &quot;internal&quot; line &#8211; I can&#8217;t wait to see how this one turns out.<\/p>\n<p>On the iMac front &#8211; I spoke to the tech today, and they&#8217;ve now also replaced the entire hard drive, as well as the cable that connects the hard drive to the logic board (they couldn&#8217;t figure out which was causing the latest problem). I&#8217;m guessing that they just had a loose connection after installing the new logic board, but I&#8217;m not going to argue with a new hard drive. At this point, the tech pointed out to me, the only parts they <em>haven&#8217;t<\/em> replaced are the screen and the power source. It was actually all fixed last week, but they hadn&#8217;t called me because they decided to just run the computer continuously for a few days to avoid the whole problem of my bringing the computer home only to have it fail the next day. I&#8217;ll hopefully be able to pick it up tomorrow. I still think giving me a new G5 iMac would have been cheaper, but since I didn&#8217;t pay for any of this, I don&#8217;t really have grounds to argue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I recognize that I&#8217;m a particularly heavy and aggressive computer user, and that as a consequence, I&#8217;m likely to experience more than my fair share of technology-related problems (hey, if you only turn on your computer once a month, it&#8217;s that much less likely that it&#8217;s going to crash, right?). But lately, it&#8217;s like I&#8217;m [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[],"tags":[23,30,3],"class_list":["post-799","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-apple","tag-bitching","tag-technology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6ZBi-cT","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/799","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=799"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/799\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3084,"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/799\/revisions\/3084"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.very-simple.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}